Eat 2 Explore Review

We are studying South America. We made Brazilian meat pockets and Peruvian Chicken using the last of our Eat 2 Explore boxes.  

While we will continue to make food from other countries as a fun addition to our studies, we won't be using Eat 2 Explore anymore. Too many times they lost the authenticity of a dish by trying to "lighten it up".  As the case of the meat pockets using puff pastry over frying them. 

Their recipes were also more concerned with giving vegetarian/dairy-free options than keeping it simple to read. Some shopping lists left off ingredients, and the instructions were sometimes hard to follow. 

Overall, we love the idea of trying new foods, and are glad Eat 2 Explore gave us the idea, but if we are going to put in the time, effort, and money to do so, we want the foods we make to be as culturally authentic as possible.

Further study of counties lead us to looking at waterfalls in Paraguay, and seeing a real live Christmas Cactus, native to Brazil, in bloom.

Brazil is the largest country in South America, boarding all other South American countries but two. They speak Portuguese. Sixty percent of the Amazon rainforest, including the Amazon River, is in Brazil. Sand from the Sahara desert is in the soil of the Amazon rainforest. And the sand has a mineral that helps plants grow. -by J 

In other school, this week J started to make a funny video interviewing Fairy Tale characters.

K has been working on bead art.

A1 continues to work on writing his story.

And they all built a fort and explored the best way to keep it from toppling over.

But perhaps the highlight of the week was some friends invited us to come meet their local library cat. J's favorite book in the world is Dewey- the small town library cat who touched the world.  She dreams of owing a library (cat included). So we made the trip to see Cosmo- a stray cat who adopted a library.